How To: Add to Your Music Collection for Less

Do you consider yourself a music connoisseur? Are you always looking for an excuse to spend your last $10 or $20 on the latest CD or record? I think it’s safe to say that a lot of us love being that person who “listened to [insert band name here] before they were cool.” Unfortunately, music can be pretty expensive. Sometimes it’s hard to find places to go for good prices on your favorite albums so you tend to go to the same one or two places. Here are a few places you can visit around New Jersey for vinyl, cassettes and CDs:

Hackensack Record King

303 Main Street

Hackensack, New Jersey

Princeton Record Exchange

20 S Tulane Street

Princeton, New Jersey

The Record Store

6299 US 9

Howell, New Jersey

Scotti’s Record Shop

351 Springfield Avenue

Summit, New Jersey

Tunes

225 Washington Street

Hoboken, New Jersey

Vintage Vinyl

51 Lafayette Road

Fords, New Jersey

These are just a few stores in the area and you can easily find some more with a little work. On April 19th, a lot of stores in the United States participated in Record Store Day. Though that date has passed, you can use this website’s “find a location” tool to find stores in your area to visit!

Source: Target.com

Source: fye.com

Sometimes it can be easy to overlook places you might not expect to have a good music selection. Browsing the shelves at stores like Target or FYE might shock you a bit. Target tends to have a decent selection of CDs but lack cassettes and vinyl. They usually try to keep up on the newer and bigger names, which can be convenient sometimes if you don’t live too close to a record store. FYE tends to have a larger selection and is great because they sell used items too. Not all locations sell vinyl, but there are a few that I have come across that have a small selection. The FYE at 1033 Bloomfield Avenue in Clifton, NJ is one of these locations.

Source: datamob.org

Another great place to find music is the internet (duh)! Utilize websites like Amazon and eBay to find good deals on used and new CDs, Vinyl, and tapes! There have been plenty of times that I’ve bought CDs for less than $5 and records usually run me about $10 depending on the artist. Discogs (discogs.com) is a great website as well. They tend to have a lot more of the items you might have a hard time finding anywhere else. There are plenty of options to specify your searches so you can browse their database pretty quickly and easily.

Source: botanique.be

Overall, there are a lot of options to turn to when you’re looking for music to add to your library. For those of you who rely on digital files for music, a lot of formats that aren’t transferable to a computer include download codes for the album so you can add that to your iTunes as well! Generally, people just overlook all of these options and download their music from the internet because music might be too expensive or hard to find but there are places you can go for cheap deals and a variety of styles to choose from.